Survey Shows Rise of Asia

Asia was the big story when the latest global
school report card was released a few months
ago. Of the 65 countries and provinces that
participated in OECD’s Programme for International
Student Assessment (PISA), which
measures the performance of 15-year-olds in
reading, math, and science, most of the top
scorers in all three subjects were Asian countries
and provinces. Shanghai and Hong Kong
SAR in China led the way, followed by Singapore,
Korea, and Japan.

As the PISA results indicate, nowhere is the
rapidity of educational change and improvement
greater than in Asia. How have Asian
school systems managed to produce such high
achievement? It’s tempting to ascribe this success
to culture, but, though a high cultural
value placed on education is a useful asset on
which to build, a generation ago these systems
had only weak education systems or schools for
just the elite. Nor do all Asian systems produce
superior performance. Much of South and
Southeast Asia, for example, does not compare
well on international education benchmarks.
And while Shanghai has produced world-class
performance and shows what the education potential
of China could be, large disparities in
academic performance currently exist between
different regions of China.

While there is no one “Asian” way to academic
success, the high-performing Asian
school systems do share some common characteristics:

• Commitment to the centrality of education
for driving economic growth. Political
leaders understand the essential link between
education and economic development
in a global knowledge economy. This conviction
has ensured a constant dynamic focus on
education over more than two decades that has
allowed these systems to keep moving forward
despite periodic changes in political leadership.

• Clear rigorous standards and aligned
systems. Asian systems establish high academic
standards and a demanding core curriculum,
especially in math and science, which
clearly define the content to be learned. Local
education decision makers have increasing autonomy,
but it’s within a coherent framework
of curriculum and examinations/assessments
that drive textbook content, teacher preparation,
and professional development. Thus, there is more consistent implementation of education
policies and practices across schools
that results in strong overall performance.

• High-quality teachers and principals.
These systems recruit from among the top
high school and college graduates and have
comprehensive approaches to training, compensating,
developing, and evaluating teachers.
Teachers are highly qualified in their subjects
— for example, in math and science —
and there often are specialist math and science
teachers in elementary schools. Classrooms in
these Asian systems are much more open to
routine observation by peers, principals, and
student teachers. Regular teacher study and research
groups make the improvement of teaching
in a school a collective professional effort.
Principals are carefully selected and trained
from among the best teachers. All of this attention
to human capital creates tremendous
capacity at the point of education delivery —
the classroom.

• Investment of resources where they
make a difference. In line with their commitment
to meritocracy, these systems invest resources
in ways that make a difference to educational
equity, whether through providing
early intervention classes, pairing strong schools
with weaker schools, rotating teachers and
principals to improve weaker schools, or rewarding
schools that improve performance. As
a result, there is less variation in achievement
between schools and less connection between
the social background of students and their educational
achievement. These systems demonstrate
that it’s possible to have both excellence
and equity.

• Time and effort. With longer school years,
often longer school days, and large amounts of
time devoted to studying outside school, Asian
students often have the equivalent of two more
years of schooling than the typical American
student by the time they finish high school.
Underpinning these education systems is the
belief, reflecting the Confucian tradition, that
hard work and effort pay off, and students are
expected to study hard both in and out of
school. The immense social mobility for families
that has been brought about by educational
expansion reinforces this commitment to student effort in developing knowledge and
skills.

• Learning systems with a global orientation.
The design of these education systems
owes a lot to lessons from other parts of the
world. Focused use of international benchmarking
and adaptation of best practices have
enabled them to continually learn and improve.
They foster a similar global outlook
among teachers, principals, and students.

Despite this impressive achievement of excellence
combined with equity, there are widely
acknowledged weaknesses in these Asian systems.
These include the excessive amounts of
time devoted to preparation for public examinations
and the sense that they are stronger at
knowledge transmission than the kind of
“learning to learn,” problem solving, and critical
thinking that will be needed to prepare students
for today’s rapidly changing world. For
this, Asian systems look to the United States
and other countries for ideas on cultivating innovation
and creativity.

High performance on international assessments
is not limited to Asia. Canada in North
America and Finland in Europe also produce
high performance on PISA with rather different
education structures. However, just as
economists and business leaders have been following
the economic rise of Asia for close to
three decades, American educators can’t afford
to remain ignorant of the growing educational
strength of Asia, a part of the world that is dramatically
increasing its significance in the 21st
century. Although the specific details of each
country’s education system remain particular
to it, the larger lessons from Asia’s journey to
educational excellence can be generalized to
other settings. Success requires a clear vision
and belief in the centrality of education for students
and the nation, persistent political leadership
and alignment between policy and practice,
a focus on building teacher and leadership
capacity to deliver reforms at the school level,
ambitious standards and assessments, broad
support in the population, and a meritocratic
culture of continuous improvement and future
orientation that benchmarks educational practices
against the best in the world.

VIVIEN STEWART is senior adviser for education for the
Asia Society.

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